No such thing as 'marriage equality'

Published 5:39 pm, Monday, April 1, 2013

I am reacting to the editorial in the Easter Sunday edition. You use the term "marriage equality" several times to make your point. To many of your readers, however, that term is an oxymoron. To claim that two very different kinds of relationship are the same, does injustice to both sorts. How can anything be equal to the institution that God established? He brings together in love the two great halves of humanity, male and female, in the service of creating new human life.

From the beginning of recorded history, God has provided the precepts and concepts man is to live by. Mankind should not supplant those God-given conditions and definitions. Many hundreds of generations have upheld God's instructions that a man should leave his family and be joined to a wife, then "be fruitful and multiply." This institution has created and woven the fabric that holds our society together -- the family. We depend on marriage to carry our civilization forward into the next centuries.

Proponents of same-sex marriage liken it to a civil right. It is certainly not a civil right. It is stealing away a God-given right granted only to a man and a woman. It devalues what God values. It undermines, demeans, demotes and perverts the purpose of true marriage.

The concept of homosexual "marriage" has crept into our language only in the last 15 or 20 years. It's newer than the cell phone or the Internet. Only six of the fifty states now say that it is even legal, let along desirable or moral. Nevertheless, the same-sex couples who are married in the eyes of those few states should merit the same civil rights that heterosexual couples now enjoy. Our legislators should make that happen.

But to force persons in all the other states immediately to make same-sex unions legal would represent a gross larceny of the rights of each state to decide the issue for itself in a slow, deliberate manner. This process needs many years, and has to be informed by reason, experience and the religious traditions of the great majority of the nation.

Re: the article "Obama urges Israel to compromise" published March 22:

Israel has already made enormous, painful compromises and is clearly ready to make more if it will bring about peace.

Even before the reestablishment of Israel, the Zionists acquiesced when Great Britain severed the East Bank of Palestine, comprising nearly 80 percent of Palestine, to create what is now Jordan, and then agreed to every further partition proposed, including the United Nations Partition Plan, even as each was rejected by the Arabs.

After it captured the currently disputed territories in 1967 after being attacked by Jordan, Israel made clear its readiness to return it all to Jordan and Egypt if those countries would agree to peace, only to be met with the infamous "Three Nos" of the Arab League: no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no peace with Israel.

At least twice it has offered virtually all the disputed territory to the Palestinian Arabs, despite the fact that Israel's historical, legal and moral claim to that land is at least as great as that of the Arabs.

The first time, Yasser Arafat responded to Israel's offer with a wave of terror. The second time, Mahmoud Abbas responded by refusing to negotiate and has publicly insisted, "I can't allow myself to make even one concession."